There is something really big happening at London’s Grand Theatre with a modern, digital recreation of Jules Verne’s classic adventure tale, “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea”. This multimedia production is sometimes overwhelming in its power and complexity and it seems that Co-creators Rick Miller and Craig Francis have followed Captain Kirk into places no man has ever gone before.
In the early years of theatre as we know it, the ancient Greeks would sometimes salvage a play they couldn’t fi nish by lowering one of their many gods onto the stage by machinery to solve the problems of ordinary dramatists. This Deus Ex Machina approach has been converted and updated to digital applications, stunning visuals and terrifi c sound effects while the Verne story is laced with modern references to endangered oceans and a threatened habitat for the creatures whose futures depend on a more careful tending to environmental concerns.
